Thursday, 12 June 2008

Tideline Journal

Been making some progress on the piece I'm making for Festival of Quilts inspired by the seaweed patterns left on a beach after a storm. After some watercolour sketches, I was ready to choose the fabric - some African dyed cotton damask ( for this sample I used the sleeves of a shirt - there should be enough left in the body for the final piece).I inset some thin strips of seaweed like colour ( quite a job trying to find a brown madder despite my extensive stash)

I stitched it by machine with twin needle and by hand - seed stitching with cotton perle. In my excitement to start painting I forgot to take a photo of what it looked like. This photo is of the back - wherever possible I use the same fabric front and back so that people can see 'before' and after' - also gives me a second chance if it all goes horribly wrong!

After painting. Detail of paintingI'm fairly pleased with the results. As it was a sample piece and with time marching on I don't want to do another, I crammed too many ideas and techniques in for the piece to work entirely successfully in itself . But its achieved its purpose, I've got a better idea now how to proceed - leaving more of the background fabric unstitched and unpainted for a start. The twin needle worked really well - I'm less sure about the fabric strip inserts , about how much they add?

3 comments:

The source photo is beautiful! I personally like the inserted strips but I agree that you could have left a little more unpainted. Funnily enough that thought was going through my head as I read down your post and viewed the photos.

It is really interesting to see the journey from source to worked sample so thank you for sharing.

What an interesting piece. Yes, I wondered why you used the interesting base fabric only to cover up the pattern with paint. But I love the squiggles - such a great way to give that feel of the rippling beach sand.

I think the inserts add a lot to the overall texture and would put them in again if I was in charge. (vbg) I was trying to look at the photo and imagine them not being there, and although I understand that you're not sure if they add much, I think it's just very subtle, and in fact adds a great deal. This is good. I like subtle - probably because I'm not!! It's lovely.